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Teachers and students can benefit from knowing the techniques of memory champions. It just takes imagination…<p>If you wanted to pinpoint the most absurdly geeky event in the world calendar, it would be difficult to beat the binary numbers challenge at the World Memory Championships. In it, a bevy of …

Imagine a labyrinthian library containing <i>all possible written works</i>—even the configurations of letters, words and sentences that don’t make any sense. First described by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges in his iconic 1941 short story <i>The Library of Babel</i>, that fantasy of an infinite space for …

“One cannot accumulate love.”<p>“If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from,” Carl Sagan wrote in his meditation on science and spirituality, “we will have failed.”<p>Between April and September of 1980, as Sagan’s <i>Cosmos</i> was making its debut and …

<b>(AP/Alessandra Tarantino)</b><p>In his speech to Congress, the pope made one thing very clear: Republicans aren’t acting very Christian<p>Patricia Miller<p>September 25, 2015 5:11pm (UTC)<p>Despite all the talk that Pope Francis’ address to Congress wouldn’t be political or partisan, it turns out it was both. And, …

Is there a link between vibrators, colouring-in books and Buddhism? Eva Wiseman unravels our obsession with passivity<p>There was a period in the late 1990s when it became fashionable to have a vibrator. To have a vibrator, and to talk about having a vibrator, and to give vibrators as gifts, and to …

“Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there.”<p>I frequently lament a particularly prevalent pathology of our time — our extreme impatience with the dynamic process of attaining knowledge and transmuting it into wisdom. We want to have the knowledge, …

“And you, O my Soul, where you stand, surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space…”<p>When <b>Walt Whitman</b> (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) self-published his first book of poetry in 1855, his monumental hopes for this labor of love were met with a few shrieks of harsh criticism amid an ether of …

<b>(AP/Jose F. Moreno)</b><p>How a promising but oversimplified idea caught fire, then got coopted by conservative ideology<p>Alfie Kohn<p>August 16, 2015 9:59am (UTC)<p>One of the most popular ideas in education these days can be summarized in a single sentence (a fact that may help to account for its …

“A friend … awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you.”<p>Aristotle laid out the philosophical foundation of friendship as the art of holding up a mirror to each other’s souls. Two millennia later, Emerson contemplated its two pillars of truth and tenderness. Another century …

If there's no afterlife or reason for the universe, how do you make your life matter? Warning: The last answer may break your heart.<p>"The way I find meaning is the way that most people find meaning, even religious ones, which is to get pleasure and significance from your job, from your loved ones, …

“Take everything that’s bright and beautiful in you and introduce it to the shadow side of yourself… When you are able to say, ‘I am … my shadow as well as my light,’ the shadow’s power is put in service of the good.”<p>In 1974, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher and Oxford alumnus Chögyam Trungpa founded …

“Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as the absence of activity … or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness.”<p><i>“We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we</i> …